Last to Die Page 3
It must have seemed like a journey worth making, despite the brevity of the visit, for Tony did take a train home. He and the family celebrated an early Christmas—not realizing, of course, that it would be the last one they would all spend together—and after only a few days in Pottstown Tony hopped a westbound Pullman headed for Oklahoma City. It wasn’t an especially enjoyable trip; the young aerial gunner got “bumped” from the train at least once so that his seat could be given to a serviceman traveling on permanent-change-of-station orders. Tony nevertheless reported to Will Rogers Field on time, and ate his Christmas dinner in a mess hall with Nudo, Pallone, and several hundred other GIs.
Essig’s crew—minus the bombardier, who wouldn’t be needed in the new role—was assigned to Will Rogers’ Combat Crew Training Station-Photo-Reconnaissance and began instruction on December 27 as Crew 86. Although the aircraft they flew during their time in Oklahoma outwardly resembled the machine they had flown at Davis-Monthan, it differed in several significant ways. Designated the F-7A, the recon version of the standard B-24J retained its full defensive armament but carried no bombs. The aircraft’s forward bomb bay was fitted with long-range fuel tanks and its aft bomb bay was sealed shut to create a workspace for an aerial photographer. This section was provided with a heater, not for the comfort of the crew but to maintain a constant temperature for the two vertical cameras mounted to shoot through small windows cut into the sealed bay doors. A three-camera “trimetrogon” system intended to capture overlapping images was installed in the former bombardier’s position in the nose, and was also fixed to shoot through small windows in the aircraft’s lower fuselage.
Though already a trained heavy bomber crew by the time they arrived at Will Rogers, the different requirements of photo-reconnaissance work meant that Essig and his men had to further sharpen some of their existing skills. Because photo-recon aircraft almost always flew alone, rather than in large formations, the navigator had to be particularly accurate in his calculations. Likewise, Essig and his copilot, Second Lieutenant John Ziegler, had to be extremely good at instrument flying, both to get the airplane to and from the target area and to keep it on a precise course during the photo run, no matter how bad the conditions might be. The fact that the aircraft would not have the protection afforded by the mutually supportive fires of a combat box formation meant that the gunners would have to be that much better at locating, identifying, and successfully engaging hostile aircraft. In addition to that vital task, Tony Marchione, Ray Zech, Rudy Nudo, and Frank Pallone were also trained as photographer assistants, learning such new skills as how to attach the cameras to their mounts and how to load and change film magazines. Although the actual operation of the cameras would be the responsibility of the aerial photographer—who would join the crew upon its arrival in the combat zone—Tony was particularly interested in the cameras and their capabilities.
Essig and his crew spent nearly three months at Will Rogers Field, and their “final exam” was a complex photo-mapping mission that took them from Oklahoma to Colorado and back. Their “target” was the area around Denver’s Lowry Army Airfield—the primary training station for AAF aerial photographers—which they “shot” from an altitude of 20,000 feet. Having successfully completed that mission and all of their assigned course work, Essig and his men were rated as “fully prepared” for their work as a photo-recon crew. In late March they received orders to report to Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, a processing center for replacement crews bound for overseas units.
Despite the rigorous training at Will Rogers that had obviously kept Tony extremely busy, he apparently found time for romance, as evidenced by a poem he wrote during the train trip from Oklahoma to Georgia.
While riding along in this weary train,
thoughts of memories run through my brain.
A thought, a poem, it’s not very much,
just to remind me of your sweet touch.
When we were together I never could talk,
but always wanted to go for a walk.
You’ve put a new world in my mind,
and that’s the world I want to find.
The stars that shine in these dark skies,
remind me of your large, blue eyes.
Your little manners are very sweet,
your little, soft voice cannot be beat.
There’s a little too much to tell you, Jo,
a lot more things that we all know.
Just how you walk and fix your hose,
The way you smile and turn your nose.10
These few, earnest lines provide us a rare glimpse into Tony Marchione’s emotional life. By this point he was, of course, a trained Army Air Forces aerial gunner bound for the war that he felt it was his duty to help fight. But he was also a young man of just nineteen, and it is quite apparent that the girl he speaks of—her full name is lost to history, as is the story of how they met—had touched his life in a real and meaningful way. Thoughts of the “girl he left behind” and of the promise that a future with her might hold have sustained many a young man as he went off to war; we can assume that thoughts of the young woman named Jo buoyed Tony as he set out on a journey from which he knew he might not return.
WHEN BOB ESSIG AND his men arrived at Hunter Field they were still under the impression that they were headed for the Mediterranean or, perhaps, England. They were soon disabused of that notion, however, for they were assigned as a replacement crew for the 20th Combat Mapping Squadron, a unit then stationed “somewhere in the Southwest Pacific,” most often a euphemism for Australia or the Philippines.
After only a few days in Georgia the young aviators were back on a train, this time headed west to Utah’s Kearns Army Air Base. Located some seven miles southwest of Salt Lake City, the installation had been a B-24 training center until mid-1943, when most of its aircraft were transferred to other stations. By the time Tony and his fellow crewmembers arrived in early April 1945 Kearns’s main tenant organization was the Army Air Forces Overseas Replacement Depot (West), which handled the processing and onward movement of personnel destined for the Pacific and Far East. Essig and his men remained at the rather austere base for just over two weeks, during which time they received yet another physical exam followed by inoculations meant to protect them against a bewildering array of tropical illnesses. They were also told to completely update their next-of-kin information and confirm the beneficiaries for their GI life insurance.
Surviving records do not indicate how Tony and his fellow aviators made the journey from Utah to the Pacific, though the standard method was by troopship or converted ocean liner from one of the two main West Coast ports of embarkation, Seattle or San Francisco. Vessels bound for the Southwest Pacific and Far East normally called at Pearl Harbor to refuel—without allowing the embarked troops ashore—then traveled on to Sydney, Australia. Upon arrival there the replacement aircrews assigned to the Far East or India would board another ship bound for their ultimate destination; in contrast, by early 1945 the men headed for New Guinea, the Philippines, or adjacent island areas would most often be transported by train to northern Queensland to board C-47 Skytrain troop carriers for the final leg of their long trans-Pacific journey. For Bob Essig’s crew that journey ended at Clark Field on Luzon, where they joined the 20th Combat Mapping Squadron by the middle of May.
Organized at Colorado Springs Army Air Base in July 1942, the 20th had deployed to the Southwest Pacific in December 1943 as part of the 6th Photographic Group and initially operated from Nadzab, New Guinea, flying F-7As. Early combat operations revealed several flaws in that initial photo-recon variant of the B-24, however, most notably that the center, vertical camera in the trimetrogon installation in the nose was inadequately protected against jarring and had to be carefully realigned before each flight. Moreover, the presence of the bow turret, and the gunner’s need to move to and from it, made for such crowded conditions in the nose compartment that changing the three camera film magazines was extremely diff
icult. The 20th Combat Mapping Squadron noted these shortcomings in a detailed report—as did several other units operating the F-7A—and by July 1944 the unit began receiving the upgraded F-7B. This variant grouped the trimetrogon system in the rear bomb bay with the other cameras, a change that greatly increased the success rate of photo-recon and aerial mapping missions, and within a few months virtually all of the squadron’s F-7s were B models.
In April 1945 the 20th received the first of an eventual five F-7Bs equipped with the AN/APS-15 ground-mapping radar system, widely referred to as H2X and “Mickey,” which had been developed from the British H2S set as a way to allow accurate bombing through cloud cover and at night. The retractable dome enclosing the radar’s antenna replaced the F-7B’s ball turret, and a radar repeater in the aircraft’s camera bay allowed crews to take photographs of the images of ground locations. The ultimate purpose of this arrangement was to allow the images to be passed on to H2X-equipped bomber units to help them better identify those targets when they appeared on their radar screens, though in practice the 20th Combat Mapping Squadron used its Mickey systems mainly to locate and map targets at night or in bad weather.
It is likely that Bob Essig and his crew had received at least some H2X training while at Will Rogers Field, because they were tapped to fly their first “Mickey” mission soon after joining the squadron. The purpose of the flight was to photo map more than a dozen Japanese positions in and around the Balete Pass in central Luzon, about sixty-five miles northeast of Clark Field. Highway 5, the two-lane road that snaked over the 3,000-foot-high pass, was the only route between Central Luzon and the strategically important Cagayan Valley. The pass had therefore been the scene of continuous, bitter fighting since U.S. and Filipino forces had launched the battle for Luzon the previous January.
Essig and his crew, augmented by aerial photographer Staff Sergeant Hunter, took off on the morning of June 1 in F-7B 44-41943. The short distance to the target area did not make the flight any less challenging, for the presence of significant enemy anti-aircraft defenses around the pass dictated frequent changes of course and altitude in order to secure the required images without getting shot up in the process. And although few Japanese fighters were still active over Luzon by that point in the war, Tony Marchione and his fellow gunners had to maintain their vigilance throughout the multi-hour flight. There was no enemy opposition, fortunately, and Tony’s first combat mission ended with the aircraft’s safe return to Clark Field just before sundown.11
Essig’s crew was not assigned a specific aircraft, and the area-familiarization and radar-training missions they undertook over the following weeks were flown in various F-7Bs. But flying was not the only thing Tony and his crewmates did at Clark Field. The men were all assigned what the military calls “collateral duties,” which for an officer might entail serving as squadron morale or recreation officer or managing the inventory of a deceased airman’s possessions before they were sent to his next of kin. The nonflying tasks for Tony and his fellow gunners included such things as working in the machine-gun maintenance shed and standing airplane guard duty. This latter task, as its name implies, required enlisted men from all of the squadron’s crews to undertake rotating four-hour shifts at night guarding the flight line to prevent sabotage or the theft of equipment.
On June 15 the broadening of the unit’s mission from combat mapping to photographic and radar reconnaissance resulted in a change of designation. From that point on the unit was known by the admittedly accurate but decidedly unwieldy title 20th Reconnaissance Squadron, Long Range, Photo-RCM (for “radar countermeasures”), or 20th Recon Squadron, for short.
Four days after the designation change Bob Essig and his crew flew their second H2X combat sortie. The mission was to be far more challenging than the Balete Pass operation, in that the target areas were on the Chinese coast. Both were port cities: Swatow, 174 miles northeast of Hong Kong, and Amoy, another 125 miles farther up the Taiwan Strait.12 The mission objective—to capture pictures and H2X images of the port facilities and their air defenses—would require a 1,500-mile round-trip flight. The aircraft assigned was the same F-7B used on the Balete Pass flight, and a Staff Sergeant Frasher was tapped as the aerial photographer for the mission.
Bob Essig lifted the F-7B off from Clark Field just after dawn and set a course to the northwest. The first leg of the flight took the aircraft out over the western edge of Lingayen Gulf, just east of Santiago Island. From that point there was nothing but water for some 600 miles, and there was little for Tony and his fellow gunners to do but continually scan the surrounding skies for any sign of enemy fighters. There were none, and the only evidence of hostile action was some inaccurate anti-aircraft fire far below the F-7B as it made landfall just south of the first target, the port at Swatow. Complete cloud cover over the area made it impossible for Frasher to take any photos, but the crew was able to get some usable H2X images. After completing a series of runs over the port facilities Essig turned the F-7B back toward the sea, and once about twenty miles offshore turned to the northeast for the 120-mile leg to Amoy. The weather was no better over the second target, however, and after Frasher captured some H2X imagery Essig banked the aircraft for home. The F-7B landed safely at Clark Field ten hours and thirty minutes after taking off.
Less than a week after Essig and his crew returned from their second combat mission U.S. forces completed the capture of Okinawa. Within days of that hard-won and costly victory the 20th Recon, like the B-32–equipped 386th Bomb Squadron, received a warning order for a permanent change of station to Yontan Airfield. Before that move took place, however, Tony Marchione and his crewmates would undertake one last mission from Clark Field—one that would prove to be the most difficult yet.
The flight on July 9 was undertaken in another H2X-equipped aircraft, F-7B 44-42028, and differed significantly from the two previous combat flights. The target was the Japanese airdrome at Koshun, Formosa—the same field that the 386th’s Dominators had bombed on their third combat-test mission less than a month earlier—and Essig and his crew would be flying the 20th Recon Squadron’s first night-photography sortie over enemy territory. The nature of the mission required a few special modifications to the aircraft. The first was the installation of a K-19B night-reconnaissance camera, fitted vertically in the F-7B’s aft compartment. The 9-by-9-inch format camera was fitted with a photocell unit that would trip the shutter when an artificial light source illuminated the target. That light source was the fifty-one-pound AN-M46 flash bomb; to carry and drop ten of them, the F-7B’s forward bomb bay was unsealed and bomb shackles were reinstalled on one side.
The Army Air Forces had first used night aerial photography in combat during the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily, and by July 1945 the techniques were well established. The AN-M46 was dropped like a conventional bomb from an altitude of 10,000 to 12,000 feet and a mechanical time fuze detonated it at 3,000 feet. The resultant 700-million-candlepower flash lasted barely a second, but allowed the K-19B to capture an image of an area roughly two miles long by four-and-a-half miles wide. Although the system worked well, there were definite drawbacks from the point of view of the dropping aircraft’s crew. The flash bomb was notoriously fragile, and the slightest jarring—such as that caused by turbulence in flight or the nearby explosion of an anti-aircraft round—could render it inoperable. More seriously, the time fuzes were known to be unreliable, and it was not uncommon for the flash bomb to detonate as soon as it left the bomb bay, with all the obvious consequences. And, finally, the fuzes could not be reset in flight, which meant that if the dropping aircraft needed to make repeated passes over the target it had to do so at a fairly constant altitude, making it a sitting duck for ground gunners.
Bob Essig and the men of his crew were undoubtedly aware of these issues, as were the two aerial photographers assigned to the mission, Staff Sergeants Hannagan and Kelsey. There were no problems during the loading of the flash bombs, however, and the F-7B lifted off from
Clark Field on schedule just before sundown. The flight to Formosa was also routine, but as the aircraft started its first photo run things started to go sour. Unusually accurate anti-aircraft fire bracketed the F-7B, and when it came time to drop the first AN-M26 the plane’s bomb-release system malfunctioned. Four of the flash bombs tumbled from the bomb bay on their own, without arming, dropping harmlessly into the night.
As Tony later described the events in a letter to a friend, the navigator and flight engineer volunteered to drop the remaining six flash bombs by hand.13 This was a particularly harrowing process. To disconnect the devices from their shackles and pull the arming wires from the fuzes before casting the flash bombs into the night, the men had to stand on the narrow catwalk that bisected the open bomb bay, with no safety line securing them and exposed to the cold wind and the buffeting caused by the ack-ack bursts. And they had to do that more than once, given that the F-7B made repeated runs over the target for nearly an hour, frequently illuminated by Japanese searchlights. Nor did things improve much after Essig turned the aircraft for home. Just after leaving the target area the number one (left outboard) engine caught fire—whether as the result of enemy action or a mechanical malfunction is unclear—and Essig had to shut the engine down and feather the propeller. The F-7B made the remainder of the journey back to Clark Field on three engines, and landed safely after eight hours and twenty minutes of total flight time.14
The men of Essig’s crew made it through the difficult mission without injury, but on July 13 Tony Marchione ended up in the Clark Field base hospital with what he described to a friend at home in Pottstown as “a slight case” of hepatitis.
There’s an epidemic of it here on Luzon—it’s nothing serious. It’s just that you lose your appetite and you’re quite sick in your stomach, but that only lasts for a week, and then you’re well, but they keep you in [the hospital] for 30 days regardless so they can keep you on a diet. Right now I feel as great as ever, but not a chance of getting out for another two weeks. Not too bad [though], getting plenty of rest and we can go swimming.